Breaking down how you should report on inbound marketing

Reporting on your inbound marketing is essential for your marketing report and in this video I've broken down how you should report on your inbound marketing daily, weekly and monthly.

Transcript In this video I’m going to break down how you should report on inbound marketing daily, weekly and monthly. You should not get yourself too hung up on reporting on a daily basis but it is important that you get yourself into the habit of checking a few things make sure things are going smoothly.

Daily reporting On a daily basis I would typically report on daily website traffic. Obviously web site traffic is the life blood of digital marketing and it’s important that you keep an eye on this on a regular basis, you can use tools such as HubSpot to keep an eye on traffic as well as Google Analytics and with this you can measure sudden spikes in traffic dips in traffic and just keep an eye on who’s coming to your website and how. Social media engagement. So a lot of people think social media is all about posting how many retweets you get and how many likes you get, the most important metric of social media is engagement – how many people come back to you and correspond with you, how many conversational pieces you have through social. If you post an article on Facebook you’re not judged on likes, you’re judge on engagement – the higher you’re engaging the cheaper your paid advertisement on social platforms become.

Weekly reporting When it comes to weekly reports I would then dip back into website traffic as well - the benefit of this is it allows you to look week-on-week and any of those previous sort of peaks in website traffic or drops in website traffic. It allows you to go back to see if it’s been resolved but also you can start looking at seasonality, you can start looking at year-on-year, week-by-week and this should also form part of your weekly report metrics. You then take that a step further and you report on blog traffic as well. It’s proven that after a week of posting a blog typically traffic to that post can dip by 90% blogs are fantastic for organic traffic and as a result, maybe dip back into those blogs, analyse traffic and see what works, what doesn’t, what your audience engage with and off that back of that we can start to build more campaigns out on a weekly basis. As well you should also monitor leads so that you can detect any dips before you get to the end of your month, before you get to the end of your goal. Checking week-by-week means that you get clarity on who’s converting, who’s becoming a lead, but doing it monthly would mean that you get to the end of your month you’ve used your marketing budget and it wasn’t a great month.

Monthly reporting Reporting monthly ensures that you’re hitting your marketing goals – it ensures your marketing efforts are paying off. It can also inform you where you should shift some of your focus perhaps to get better performance from inbound. Again on a monthly basis dip back into web traffic but this time maybe segment that organic referral and direct social and sort of build that report out to talk about the different sources and the different ways that people are coming to your site as well. Importantly, monthly look at page performance. Have a look at which page has performed the best. By perform I don’t necessarily mean speed. What I mean is which page is bringing the most visitors, which page is converting the best. Make sure your most viewed pages have a call to action that a user can take, a button, an emotive piece of text that pushes somebody into a ‘hey download this asset, fill in this form’ and capture that data that goals towards your marketing goals. And then Campaigns. As you build out monthly campaigns make sure you report on these as well, how much did an individual cost, what was the ROI on these campaigns, has a certain campaign got a better lead to visitor conversion for example. You’d wrap that up by reporting on cost per lead, lead to customer conversion and cost per acquisition so one of the biggest benefits of inbound marketing is you’re able to report to the penny how much visitors are costing how much leads are costing and how much each customer actually costs for you to acquire through digital channels.